Where were you last night? I was here, with you, though you thought I was your father. Where were you last night? Out dancing with my lover who never forgets my name.

Where are the children? They are grown with children of their own. They live in their own homes.Where are the children? They are waiting in the silken sky for your goodnight kisses.

Do you want a cup of tea? Not now. I’m busy. You made some an hour ago. Do you want a cup of tea? I want many things I can no longer have. I want to stand with you under the canopy and never look forward.

How many children did I give birth to? You cradled them both in your arms, raised them to adulthood. How many children did I give birth to? Daughter earth is calling. Go gently to her.

Where are my keys? I told you. Check the back pocket of your bag. Where are my keys? We are locked inside this room together.

Is it time yet? We have plenty of time.Is it time yet? Yes, it is time.

after Mark Strand

Second PrizeYungayby Art Heifetz

This is not Pompeii where the dead are on display like plaster sculptures, their last horrific gestures frozen for the ages while the guide drones on with scholarly precision. This is more recent, more frightening, more real, an entire city crushed beneath the flowering mountain plants, blessed by the downturned hands of the towering white Christ who stands atop the ossuary like a groom on a wedding cake.

The serene nevadas bear no trace of the fury they unleashed. Children circle round the monuments. Finches alight on the four remaining palms. As if the screams at the circus when the earth split its seams, of the people huddled in the church when the avalanche roared down were only the screams of a feverish child awakening safely in his mother’s arms. As if the coche de Ancash were heading back to Huaraz as usual. As if the premonitions of the good doctor were only the ravings of a loco.

No this is not Pompeii. If it were our andina guide would not be hiding her tears beneath dark glasses. I would not be hearing the cries of my lost son as he slid beneath the truck. Your best friend would not be calling out to you from the rubble in Managua.

Third PrizeMikeby Jan Fitzgerald

The photo in the lounge told the story. A handsome man sitting on a hay bale in a barn flanked by his wife, four children and six border collies their ruffs ribboned with medals.

Other dogs he had buried under the willows each with its own headstone. He would greet them as he drove by on the tractor Morning Georgie! Champ! Flicker! And somewhere from the freshly mown hay smell of sun on the river stones they'd answer.

And so it was each morning that we held him up in the hoist and removed his pyjamas to wash him face hands armpits chest belly privates eased on his rugby shorts settled him in the wheelchair put on his fleecy checked shirt and the hat crowned with winning dog badges laced up his boots fed him his porridge and cup of tea... wheeled him into the hospital lounge by his photo

left him calling out Hunter! Flash! Shadow! Mac! Bailey! Jess!

Honorable MentionWhen They Ask Usby Niki Nymark

When Moses saw the golden calf, he shattered the Commandments into dust like desert sand, gold and azure speckles that spilled and filled the peoples’ eyes, and ears, the corners of their mouths and the fringes of their garments.

Nobody knew what the fragments said, but everyone had a atom of “I am,” or “Thou shalt,” or “Father and Mother.” Everyone had a particle of “lech lecha,” or “if not now, when.”

God didn’t make it easy. God said, “The first tablets, I created with gold and precious gems, I signed My name in the corner, “The Artist of the Heavenly Word“. This time you’ll have to make them by hand. I’m not even going to tell you what to say, you have to remember that yourselves.”

Moses kicked himself. The people cried aloud, but they felt the prickly shards of Torah in their eyes, they could taste them in their mouths. they itched with curiosity, began to search for the ten words, so elusive, and all the meaning folded within them.

We search for them still. It takes a whole people to find all the tiny letters, no one can do it alone. So, who are the Jews? We are the people who feel the itch We are the people who search together.

Honorable MentionJoseph's Coat by Dina Yehuda

I know how it feels to have your father drape his hopes

over your shoulders a soft cloak warm and wondrous

woven from golden sheaves and silver stars and all the colors in earth and heaven

Yet all the while you know that your brothers wait and work for the words you bask in daily

and the coat begins to hang heavier with each sun scorched day

I know how it feels to wear your brothers’ envy to have to live with love

undeserved for which you have not worked but have only dreamed.

Honorable MentionYiddishby Yakov Azriel

Yiddish, You lived across the sea In die alte haim, the Old Country, In a kingdom that is no more. Come to my country To teach me the lieder, the songs You once sang And the niggunim, the tunes Your clarinetists and your violinists used to play.

Speak to me, Yiddish, I fear I am becoming as mute as you, Another Bontshe Schveig, Bontshe the Silent. Look, I have brought you a buttered roll, I have brought you raisins and almonds And a little white goat to sleep under your bed. Yiddish, mein tei'ereh, my precious one, Light your Shabbos candles And let me hear your voice.

And dance with me, Yiddish, we shall dance together Like a chasan and kolleh, a bridegroom and bride, With only a handkerchief between us, Gelibte meine, my beloved one.

Zog mir, tell me, please — What light in the night-sky will the world know And who shall pull its tides Without the levoneh, the moon, of a Yiddish word?

I wander in a castle's unweeded garden, In an untended orchard, in a forest, And cannot find my way. Perhaps you can be my guide, Shaine Yiddish, die bas-melech, Beautiful Yiddish, princess — For I am lost, Lost in translation.

Honorable MentionThe Bindingby Joel Moskowitz

In your interminable infancy–– I suppose that you drank too long at Mom's breast–– I painted and repainted with keen fervor a life-sized Binding of Isaac, a drastic deed, potentially important canvas, but–– like most of my work from that period––

never finished. Was it the bat's fault?–– that creature hanging between panes of the studio window, its dark wings folded neatly all the while I was losing my purpose in painting that old family trauma–– perhaps to work out something aching between my father and me.

My son, now that you're almost thirteen–– are your bar mitzvah blessings memorized? I'll swell with pride when you stand on the bima. Meanwhile, your shoe's already bigger than mine, so we expect a growth spurt.

But, I worry. As we climb Tippling Rock, a Native American sacred landscape, we pass Jack in the pulpits, delicate ferns, our whole town below us caught through trees–– and you're totally bored,

lean one of your long arms like a yoke on my shoulders. Then in the kitchen, you stand on your toes, our faces almost rubbing, yours menacing. You ask, Do you want to die?

Today, after we fought over the TV, I found that pen knife I've kept since college stabbed into the top of my drafting table. The tool's metal shaft, like a finger, cursed me for being your father.

Honorable MentionA Soldier Learns to Sleepby David Silverman

A Soldier Learns to Sleep

wherever and whenever he can. Once, he slept in the back of a truck, heading to battle on the Syrian border. Undisturbed by the rutted road or sound of gunfire in the distance, he dreamed he was in bed with his wife, their infant son nestled between them. When the truck stopped, they had to poke his shoulder with the butt of an M-16 to wake him.

That day, Tal, Yoav, and Itamar fell.

Years later, in bed with his wife, he dreams he is riding in the back of a truck, heading to battle on the Syrian border. Next to him is his son. Undisturbed by the rutted road or sound of gunfire in the distance, his son sleeps, like a soldier.

Reality, memory, dream, nightmare. When the conscious and unconscious converge, even the dead awaken.

Honorable MentionBorder Bluesby Johnmichael Simon

Beyond these orchards roars the road, winding between villages and hills, a writhing asphalt snake, southward it heaves, then east again, until it disappears leaving a constant echo in its wake.

Trucks rumble up and down the road, laden with sand from quarries, rocks and timber. Some are covered with tarpaulins and even binoculars can only guess their contents – bulky, ominous, concealed.

Dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’, brothers from cousins, hard by the road, a wire fence, marked off by electronic posts, pencils in twenty yard segments the barrier which, in its way, despite seeming fragility

Shouts louder than a road can understand. It shouts ‘keep out’,’ no entry’, ‘military zone’ in Hebrew, English, Arabic. Here only crows, mountain breeze and ants cross with impunity, heedless of the signs, the wires, the road.

Signboards pointing to the border still bear the legend ‘The Good Fence’, and now and then a visitor, still uninformed arrives, asks for directions to the gate where women smiling behind burqas once peddled halvah

Olives and pastel-colored squares of Rahat Lokum, their children and ours observing each other curiously like animals in a zoo. That was before the war, now gateway, smiles and kiosks are replaced with concrete walls

While children in their schoolrooms, so close yet not so close, chant ‘God is Great’, or sing of cypress trees that grow in Lebanon, unconscious of the irony – the trees, the birds, the ants and God – don’t really care at all.

Honorable MentionSanction by Rachael Clyne

They sell them now in Sainsbury’s between rice cakes and crispbreads low calorie, yeast free appealing to an eco-clientele ever grazing nouveau pastures Rakusen’s Matzot still bear the sanction of Beth Din.

The Jew in me who craves acceptance is pleased to share her soulfood. Deeper down another rankles. The wounded Jew cries out This is mine, sacred!

Passover bread baked in memory of endless hurried departures escape from the Angel of Death. No time to taste the yeast of life between slavery and desert.

This precious freedom painfully won is eaten once a year how dare you take it from me would you wrap communion wafers in cellophane and sell them too?

Jews were murdered for making matzot not martyred blood of Christian boys Hugh of Lincoln’s name resounds with hundreds slaughtered in his name.

Now they lie among slimming breads I wonder if the dead would sanction this instead, a place on the shelf the final integration?

Honorable MentionBudapest and Beyond by Breindel Lieba Kasher

Mr. Feldman, my driver, and his wife are survivors Living in Budapest’s Jewish quarter

4 in the morning Mrs. Feldman boils milk for our coffee In her kosher kitchen, she worries over her husband Like a mother of children she could not have

Our papers in order, at the Ukrainian border Police detain us for hours, as if we are criminals Mr. Feldman whispers: “Don’t ask questions, give simple answers, don’t look them in the eye”

She opens slowly and pulls me in quickly As if still in hiding, her basement memories Resurface in Yiddish, she has not spoken since the war

The war took all: Family, friends, neighbors, streets, smells, shadows, songs Her mother’s tongue, dead and gone, only she lives With her husband, the man who hid her in the basement

Afternoon turns evening, we hold each other, weeping It is hard leaving, back to Budapest The border police break our thermos full of coffee Mrs. Feldman made that morning

Honorable MentionThe Carrierby Irene Bloom

Like a recessive gene I am a carrierof hidden secretslost childhoods and forgotten stories

but they are not yet mine to tell

In my youth they waitedgerminated in guilt twisted and silentshrouded inside their genetic code

My mother who lived those horrors of a Holocaustplanted them unknowinglydeep within me

Today she relates them to strangersin the supermarketin spite of my shame

Perhaps after a generationwhen the proper time comesI will bring them to the surfacedominant and strong

When she is gone her storieswill be revealed again their telling will becomemy taskmy burdenmy honor

Honorable MentionThe Passing of That Nightby Bernard Mann

We grieved the passing of that night,a night unlike any other, so we murmured,So good the air, softly stirred by a hand called a breeze, a wandering air that curled and came about to hold and caress.

So warm the touch, fingering keys that brought the notes that carried the hues that planted the seeds of what we’ll rememberin tomorrow’s florist shop of long-stemmed memories,

So vivid in the mind’s eye, swifts winging against a mauve and crimson sunset, of couplings in ocean surf, towels splashed across a sand-dune fence,

So sharp the cries of gulls and the terse utterings of terns now so interchangeable with yours, and minethat a thousand years hence either you or I or they will see and hear it yet again much as it burned itself into the dusk, into that deepest evening indigo.

So good the taste of salt upon the tongue, upon the lip of ocean's edge, upon the shore upon the islet where no one had ever been.

So fond the heart for the dying days. So lonely the heart for the morrow for which desire longs, eager in its waiting

for the rose-nippled dawnto seduce yet all again.

Honorable MentionFifties Flashbackby Jennifer Lagier

A Sears repairman removed the pegboard back of our giant black and white TV, fussed inside.

He’s cleaning out the dead cowboys, Daddy told my sister and me as we watched, open-mouthed.

My father always set the alarm ten minutes early—4:50 instead of 5:00 A.M.—so he could fall back into a gauzy sleep on the hide-a-bed in the living room. Perhaps he was gentling himself, showing himself a deliberate kindness, by adding a stepbetween oblivion and the icy joltof another exhausting day. Perhaps his sleep was made that much more delicious because he was almost conscious of it, almost enjoyed the sensation of sleeping while sleeping, thought ah, ten…nine…eight…sevenmore long minutes (as I did, following his lead on interminable high school mornings), before, rank with sleep sweat, he sat a few seconds in striped boxers and ribbed undershirt, then hauled himself up to shower in our tinybathroom, humid with laundry,and get dressed for work.

It’s terrifying how far back this memory goes. I feel as if I’ve had to lie on my belly with a head lamp and inch forward in the dark to see it. And now I grab hold of it, as if he could have ten minutes again, and I could grant them becauseI remember how he treasured them: ten minutes good as pre-dinner cupcakes for a kidwho’s been bullied at school when at lastat home; ten more minutesof breathing, for me to see him,nine, eight, seven, six—as iften minutes would sweeten arm-twistingdeath, or gentle us into braving his.